Gateway Pundit provides a riveting comparative exercise putting the casualty rate in Iraq in perspective.

The recorded Iraqi civilian fatalities (including insurgents, military, morgue counts, police, etc.) were down 16% (16% maximum) in 2005... 38% (48% maximum) less than 2003 (via Leftist anti-war site Iraq Body Count). If you take out the numbers from that horrible day in August 2005 when nearly one thousand panicked Iraqis were trampled or drowned near a Muslim shrine, the year shows striking progress compared to 2003 and 2004 with fatalities one third less than in 2004.

...John Hinderaker at Powerline adds this: A total of 2,471 service members have died in Iraq from 2003 to the present, a period of a little over three years. That total is almost exactly one third of the number of military personnel who died on active duty from 1980 to 1982, a comparable time period when no wars were being fought. Until very recently, our armed forces lost servicemen at a greater rate than we have experienced in Iraq, due solely to accidental death.

Do you recall that during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s there was any suggestion, from anyone, that our military policies were somehow disastrous due to fatalities among our servicemen--fatalities that nearly always exceeded those we are now experiencing in Iraq? No, neither do I.

...To further put things in perspective, Newsmax reported yesterday that...

Iraq Is Less Violent than Washington, D.C.

Using Pentagon statistics cross-checked with independent research, King said he came up with an annualized Iraqi civilian death rate of 27.51 per 100,000. While that number sounds high - astonishingly, the Iowa Republican discovered that it's significantly lower than a number of major American cities, including the nation's capital. ‘It's 45 violent deaths per 100,000 in Washington, D.C.,’ King told Crowley. Other American cities with higher violent civilian death rates than Iraq include: Detroit - 41.8 per 100,000; Baltimore - 37.7 per 100,000.

Yes, the violence in Iraq is dreadful. There’s a war on, whose intensity reflects the enormity of the stakes being played. The forces of Islamist fascism simply cannot afford to allow the forces of (relative) freedom and democracy to win. Unlike so many in the west, the Islamist fascists fully understand that a free, stable and prosperous Iraq will destabilise and help destroy tyranny in the entire region and its capacity to hold the rest of the world to ransom. An Iraq that slides back into that tyranny will help cement it.

That’s why the free world cannot afford to lose in Iraq. But it may do so, with untold consequences for all of us; and if it does, much of the cause should be laid at the door of those who, willing defeat from the very start for reasons of vicious political partisanship, ancient prejudices and modern loss of cultural nerve, have so distorted public perception – through decontextualising the casualty figures in Iraq, for example – that public support for this great fight has just drained away.

Yes, abuses such as occurred at Abu Ghraib and now maybe Haditha have had a profound effect too. But once again, the way these have been reported -- as if the behaviour of the US military has been as bad as, if not even wose then, the terror perpetrated by Saddam -- has played a major role in breaking the public's spirit. Abuses happen in all military conflicts. Soldiers fighting for the most noble of ends sometimes behave in appalling ways. It's reprehensible, and should be punished. But dwelling upon it obsessively, inflating or distorting what happened and equating such aberrations with systematic tyranny, are all fuelling an atmosphere of hysteria in the west and handing Zarqawi his most potent weapon. If we had behaved like this during World War Two, we would have lost it.

The attrition from the relentless propaganda of appeasement and defeatism is working. The peoples of the free world have been successfully demoralised. The poison is now endemic. Did you do a double-take at the figures given above? Point made.